updated 09:05 am EST, Mon November 21, 2011

ASUS Padfone may carry 1.5GHz quad Snapdragon

ASUS' delayed Padfone may give users a performance treat after an inadvertently posted benchmark uncovered its processor choice. The smartphone and tablet hybrid should have a Snapdragon S4 (MSM8960), Qualcomm's faster 1.5GHz chip, which might mean a quad-core. The GLBenchmark test gave surprisingly low performance, in many cases getting two and a half stars out of five, although the test was running Android 2.3.5 and appeared to be using two cores out of the possible four.

The benchmarking supported this by having the clock speed topping out at around 918MHz, suggesting that the tablet was capped by software. Not much else is known other than that the phone component will have a 540x960 display.

Padfones should ship sometime in early 2012 and, given the timing, may wait for Android 4.0 to complete the hybrid effect. Both the 10-inch tablet and the 4.3-inch smartphone have their own independent operating systems, but ASUS can now use the same basic code base for both and simplify sharing content between the two when the phone is docked in the tablet's back. [viaNotebook Italia]